Learn Inyi

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mira
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Learn Inyi

Post by mira »

Hello traveller!

In this thread I will be posting a series of lessons for he who has interest in learning Inyi!

Each lesson is nice and brief and has some practice tasks at the end of each one. Each lesson will introduce some new words of vocabulary and 1 new concept at a minimum.

I will be adding to this as I go so don't get confused if the lessons stop half way through as I'm probably still making the next one.

PM me if you want any specific vocab words for applied use of the language, but I can't guarantee I'll get back to you particularly quickly.

Good luck in your self-teaching.

[:D]
Last edited by mira on 20 Jun 2016 23:49, edited 2 times in total.
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mira
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Re: Learn Inyi

Post by mira »

Lesson 1: Sounds of the language

Inyi has a small number of sounds and the pronunciation of each letter is the same every time, making it very easy to tell how a word is said. Below is a list of all the letters in the romanisation of Inyi with a British English example and IPA representation:
  • "p" as in "petal" or /p/
  • "t" as in "target" or /t/
  • "k" as in "kettle" or /k/
  • "n" as in "needle" or /n/
  • "f" as in "fish" or /f/
  • "s" as in "seal" or /s/
  • "h" as in "hotel" or /h/
  • "c" as in "tsunami" or /ʦ/
  • "y" as in "yellow" or /j/
  • "i" as in the "ee" in "bee" or /i/
  • "e" as in "empire" or /ɛ/
  • "a" as in "apple" or /a/
Practice these in the words shown and get to know those sounds as you'll be hearing a lot of them later on.

Here are 6 words to learn this lesson:
  • deliciousness : epakpeyat
  • an act of eating : seia
  • an act of greeting : feyinkeya
  • man : epaken
  • pizza : take
  • quickliness : hinefneyat
Last edited by mira on 20 Jun 2016 23:53, edited 4 times in total.
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Lambuzhao
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Re: Learn Inyi

Post by Lambuzhao »

"hinefneya" : "quickliness"
Don't you mean 'swiftness'?
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mira
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Re: Learn Inyi

Post by mira »

Lambuzhao wrote:
"hinefneya" : "quickliness"
Don't you mean 'swiftness'?
Nope. When conjugated to being a descriptive verb, it means "quickly". That's supposed to be a noun version of it. I guess you could think of it as "swiftness" but that may cause some confusion later on.
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Re: Learn Inyi

Post by mira »

Lesson 2: Clause Ordering

Inyi uses a OVS clause order. This means the target of an action comes before the verb where the thing doing the action comes after. While this example is not OVS, think of the word order as that in the example:
  • "Pizza is eaten by Steve"
If you are using an intransitive verb, a verb with no Object, then you don't add an object! If it is an "I" or a "You" or some other pronoun that is the subject, this can be omitted as the verb will still carry the meaning. However it should be kept in when speaking formally.

To get into the habit of this word order, challenge yourself to speak using that order for a day or an afternoon, saying things like "Dinner will be eaten by me" instead of "I'll eat dinner".

Here's a few more words of vocab to get you into the sound of the language:
  • bread : enpa
  • cards (game) : efinkai
  • child : teika
  • an act of playing : teiceya
  • woman : hinpeyaifpa
Last edited by mira on 21 Jun 2016 12:43, edited 4 times in total.
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GrandPiano
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Re: Learn Inyi

Post by GrandPiano »

OTheB wrote:Inyi uses a SVO clause order. This means the target of an action comes before the verb where the thing doing the action comes after. While this example is not SVO, think of the word order as that in the example:
  • "Pizza is eaten by Steve"
Do you mean OVS?
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Re: Learn Inyi

Post by mira »

Lesson 3: Your first Sentences

Now you have some vocabulary, it's time to start forming your first sentences! I'll explain how this works using the example sentence:
  • "The man eats pizza."
First let's start with our object in our sentence, "pizza". You'll know that the Inyi word for "pizza" is "take". This is all we need.

Next is our verb - this is where it gets tricky. You'll know that "an act of eating" is "seia", but this is a noun. The infinitive of a verb (denoted by the "a" suffix) is treated as a noun in Inyi. To make it an actual verb, we need to conjugate it.

Observe the following table. This shows all the possible conjugations for a verb. In our sentence, our man "eats" pizza. This is the present simple tense. We could refer to this man as a "He" and so we choose the correct column in our table and get our suffix: "eta". Now we place this on the end of our verb after removing the infinitive suffix. We get "seieta". If our verb ended in an "a" or an "e" then we would add a "y" before our suffix as "e"s and "a"s cannot follow each other.

Image

Now we have "The man". We know that "man" is "epaken" in Inyi, but this is not all we need to do. Here, "man" uses the definite article "the". So we add the suffix "kit" to the end to say it is a specific man and not just "a man". We could also use the suffix "kiast" to mean "men in general". Our subject then becomes:
  • "epakenkit"
Now we can piece our sentence together! Object Verb Subject means our sentence is:
  • "take seieta epakenkit"
Congratulations! You can speak some Inyi!

Practice this by replacing some of the words and changing the conjugation. You could even say you are the one that is eating pizza by using "aten" as your subject or not having a subject at all - but always think about your conjugation suffix! One thing to keep in mind is this: If the infinitive of a verb ends in "ya", the "y" has been added to make it fit, just like adding a "y" before our conjugation suffix.

Your vocab to learn for this lesson is the conjugation suffixes, and the definite and general articles.
Last edited by mira on 21 Jun 2016 16:58, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Learn Inyi

Post by mira »

GrandPiano wrote:
OTheB wrote:Inyi uses a SVO clause order. This means the target of an action comes before the verb where the thing doing the action comes after. While this example is not SVO, think of the word order as that in the example:
  • "Pizza is eaten by Steve"
Do you mean OVS?
yes! Thanks for pointing that out. I'll correct that immediately.
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Re: Learn Inyi

Post by mira »

Lesson 4: Describing things

Now that we can form sentences, it's time to flesh them out with some description. this is generally very simple but there is one bit that's quite tricky to wrap your head around!

To throw you in at the deep end somewhat: adjectives and adverbs? These are all verbs now. From hereon, these will be called Descriptive Verbs whilst normal verbs will be called Action Verbs. The infinitive of a descriptive verb ends with "at" and, like action verbs, acts as a noun version of that verb. So it we want to describe something with it, we need to conjugate it!

You should have learned the conjugation suffixes now (or some of them, you can keep referencing the table), so you will be able to do this next bit quite quickly.

To describe a word, place all the words you want to use to describe it after it and before any other words. The order of them usually doesn't matter but there is one key point to remember:
If the context of conversation is the colour of things for example, then call your colour descriptive verbs come first. So contextually coherent descriptive verbs always come first out of multiple descriptive verbs.

So, let's go through this in more detail by using an example:
  • "The man quickly ate the delicious pizza."
So we start with the Object. We have our "delicious pizza" and we need the definite article and our descriptive verb. So we can jump straight in and start off with "takekit". Then we need to conjugate our descriptive verb to the tense of the clause so it all agrees. It may seem a little strange conjugating descriptions, but think of our sentence like this: "The man quickly ate the pizza that was delicious". So we add the correct suffix to our descriptive verb and we get the start of our sentence: "takekit epakpeyete". Notice here how we use the He/She/It person as that is what our pizza is.

Now our Verb section. We take our action verb and conjugate it to get "seiete". Then we take our descriptive verb and conjugate that, stick it after our action verb and we get the middle part of our sentence:
  • "seiete hinefneyete"
Then we have our man which is the same as in the previous lesson. We can then put our sentence together in OVS order to get:
  • "takekit epakpeyete seiete hinefneyete epakenkit."
You can now use descriptive verbs to describe nouns and verbs! But there is one thing left.

If we want to say that "The man is a child" then we need to do the somewhat strange act of conjugating a noun. This is as simple as putting the correct conjugation suffix on the end of our noun. There's no suffix already there so we don't need to remove anything. So we get our sentence:
  • "epakenkit teikayeta."
Conjugating anything is what stops it from being a noun. It could also be argued that it adds the verb "to be" by itself as what is our pizza doing? Being delicious.

Practice describing things by swapping out the words for others and changing the conjugation.

Below is some vocab to learn. I'm only giving you two words as there was a lot to learn from last lesson.
  • an act of drinking : atpeya
  • water : ipne
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Re: Learn Inyi

Post by mira »

Lesson 5: The writing system

Inyi has a small alphabet of 17 characters. Each character is joined to the next to form a continuous connection through each word. There is a little flick at the start and end of each word as you can see in the examples. Vowels are separate characters placed between consonants above the connecting line. Vowel pairs have their own symbol as shown in the table.

This image is rather large:
Spoiler:
Image
Practice writing the vocabulary and sentences we have covered in previous lessons in the Inyi alphabet and see how it looks!

No vocab this lesson, but you should try and learn the alphabet from memory. In future lessons, try writing down any words and sentences in the Inyi alphabet to get used to reading and writing it.
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KpTroopaFR
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Re: Learn Inyi

Post by KpTroopaFR »

Just one silly question. When you say the "i" is pronounced like the "ee" in "bee", do you mean it's a long i ? Or just an sound ?
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Re: Learn Inyi

Post by Zythros Jubi »

Why do they have a word for pizza?
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Re: Learn Inyi

Post by mira »

KpTroopaFR wrote:Just one silly question. When you say the "i" is pronounced like the "ee" in "bee", do you mean it's a long i ? Or just an sound ?

Just a normal /i/. However, I have noticed that I am pronouncing some "i"s not next to other vowels as /ɪ/.

Zythros Jubi wrote:Why do they have a word for pizza?

Why wouldn't they? It is a word that is used somewhat often so a person that is going to speak this language would need a word for pizza if they are to be able to communicate effectively with others.
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KpTroopaFR
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Re: Learn Inyi

Post by KpTroopaFR »

OTheB wrote:Lesson 5: The writing system

Inyi has a small alphabet of 17 characters. Each character is joined to the next to form a continuous connection through each word. There is a little flick at the start and end of each word as you can see in the examples. Vowels are separate characters placed between consonants above the connecting line. Vowel pairs have their own symbol as shown in the table.

This image is rather large:
Spoiler:
Image
Practice writing the vocabulary and sentences we have covered in previous lessons in the Inyi alphabet and see how it looks!

No vocab this lesson, but you should try and learn the alphabet from memory. In future lessons, try writing down any words and sentences in the Inyi alphabet to get used to reading and writing it.
I've just noticed that you're using an abugida ! Or is it an abjad ?
Anyway, my conlang, Vaku, uses an abugida ! Boy do I love this system.
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Re: Learn Inyi

Post by mira »

I think it's actually more just an alphabet. Each consonant sound has a symbol and they're placed in line. The vowels are also their own symbols, but they are just added in in a slightly different way to the other letters.
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KpTroopaFR
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Re: Learn Inyi

Post by KpTroopaFR »

OTheB wrote:I think it's actually more just an alphabet. Each consonant sound has a symbol and they're placed in line. The vowels are also their own symbols, but they are just added in in a slightly different way to the other letters.
Okay. I'll try to write some Inyi words and sentences to train. Very interesting conlang of yours.
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Re: Learn Inyi

Post by mira »

KpTroopaFR wrote:
OTheB wrote:I think it's actually more just an alphabet. Each consonant sound has a symbol and they're placed in line. The vowels are also their own symbols, but they are just added in in a slightly different way to the other letters.
Okay. I'll try to write some Inyi words and sentences to train. Very interesting conlang of yours.
Thankyou, though personally I'm not very proud of it. It's my first and it is a Swiss cheese language.
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